Who Let the Red Dogs Out?

Microsoft went from zero to 60 with its cloud computing platform, Windows Azure. The leader of the core group behind the effort to build a cloud operating system, code-named Red Dog, talks about how they immersed themselves in the world of cloud computing, services and data centers.

How was Microsoft able to go from zero to 60 on a brand-new cloud operating
system in only two years?
Well, ZDNet's Mary Jo
Foley appears to have some insight into that based on a Feb. 23 post that
looks like it will be the first of a series. Microsoft apparently granted Foley
access to its "Red Dog" team, which is responsible for delivering the
cloud operating system that is at the heart of Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud
computing platform. That cloud OS is code-named Red Dog-a moniker given to the
project after a road trip team members took to research their push into the
cloud and services world.

What appears to have helped Microsoft along is that the man pushing the
development of Red Dog, Ray Ozzie, was not a longtime Microsoft insider. That in
many minds was supposed to be the exact quality that was going to be Ozzie's
downfall at the software giant. And yet in the case of building out Azure it
was an asset.

Ozzie tapped Amitabh Srivastava, corporate vice president with
responsibility for Windows Azure, to help establish the team that would build
Red Dog. Srivastava said Ozzie "was completely high on services,"
while he himself was a leader on the Windows team and had no background in
services. But that's OK. As Srivastava said, all the other cloud contenders,
such as Google and Amazon.com, "are just 5 minutes into the first
quarter" of the game of cloud computing.
Tasked with building up a team, one of the first people Srivastava asked to
join up was Dave Cutler, the famed operating system designer who led the
development of the Digital Equipment Corp. VMS minicomputer operating system
and Windows NT. And soon the team consisted of about 20 hard-core developers on
what amounted to a software ninja mission of "servicizing" the
Microsoft platform.
Indeed, wrote Foley:

"Almost nobody inside Microsoft
knew about Red Dog," Srivastava said. (Including Chairman Bill Gates, he
noted.) "And none of us (on the team) knew if it was going to work."

Also according to the post:

"Our problem was how do you
create a services mindset?" Srivastava said. Instead of spending years
crafting an operating system and then deploying it, the team needed to think
about writing pieces of software that would be deployed immediately.

In addition, Srivastava wrote a memo called "Owning the Cloud,"
which laid out Microsoft's game plan for getting into and winning in the cloud
computing game.
Part of the team's overall strategy was that "the key to the cloud was
to be able to better manage the data center," Foley wrote.
"The idea became managing a data center as an
operating system," Foley quoted Srivastava as saying. "We wanted to
abstract the whole thing and manage all the resources."

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.